"As a young man Sydney Bolt witnessed some of the most remarkable events in recent world history. He reached India at a time when the Japanese armed forces were powering through Southeast Asia and dealing a humiliating blow to European colonial empires from which they would never recover. His memoir covers the period of the rise of nationalist revolt in India and the climax of Gandhi's civil disobedience movement. He was on the Burma front as British and Indian armies began finally to push the Japanese back in some of the bloodiest fighting of the Second World War. What makes Mr Bolt's memoir so significant is the perspective from which he viewed these events. Most memoirs of this period were written by soldiers, administrators and journalists, who accepted or at least acquiesced in the existence of the British Empire. Mr Bolt did not. He was a communist who had struck up friendships with Indian communists while he was at Cambridge University. Despatched to the East by the authorities, his aim was to 'bore into the British Empire from within." - from the Preface by Professor C. A. Bayly.

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